Awhile back I posted “How to Add an Affiliate Link to a YouTube Video”, which used the LinkedTube service.

Fortunately, Jon, an NPT reader wised me up to an even better service – Viewbix.

Watch the video below to find out how the Viewbix service is a better option for affiliates and why LinkedTube is sometimes a little weird.

Do you have any suggestions for adding affiliate links to videos? Leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Now that the BubblePly service is no longer available, I had to find a new way to embed affiliate links in YouTube videos.

The following video shows you how to generate commissions by adding affiliate links to videos that are embedded on your blog using the LinkedTube service.

Do you know of other ways to do this? Please go ahead and share in the comments section below.

Cheers,

On Sunday, January 17th, Jeremy Palmer and I presented Video: Biggest Affiliate Marketing Opportunity Since Google at Affiliate Summit West 2010.

The presentation covered a number of video marketing information and essentials such as:

• Online Video Statistics
• YouTube Statistics
• Why Use Video Marketing?
• Equipment Requirements
• Optional Equipment
• Making Your Video
• Creating a YouTube Channel
• Uploading to YouTube
• Being Social on YouTube
• Ranking Factors on YouTube
• How to Improve Your Rankings
• Marketing Your Video

As much as I’d like to share the full presentation with you, I can’t as per my Affiliate Summit speaker agreement. What I CAN do however is share a summary of what I think are the most important points, a few statistics and why you need to include video marketing as part of your online marketing strategy asap.

A Few Online Video Statistics

• 3.8 billion searches are conducted through YouTube each month according to Comscore.
• U.S. residents watch more than 30 billion videos each month.
• 81% of the total US Internet audience watched online video.
• The average viewer watches 8 hours of video per month

Why Video Marketing?

The numbers above should convince you that there is a huge market out there looking to online videos for information.

Here’s an example.

When I checked Google Analytics the morning of our presentation, I saw that of the 892 referring sites that sent traffic to this site, YouTube was in the 7th spot — and only after my direct traffic from my own sites.

In other words, YouTube was my primary source of direct traffic.

Those visitors stayed an average of 7 minutes 43 seconds on the site, visiting 8.54 pages.

The only better retention rates were through visits from RosalindGardner.com, presumably because those folks already know of my work. Too, the percentage of new visitors from YouTube was about 20% higher than from my own sites.

Compare that to StumbleUpon visitors, of whom 97.8% were new to the site, and looked at an average of 2.28 pages in a mere 18 seconds. That’s some pretty fast clicking! I just hope they left via paying links.

What all that means in a nutshell, is that by using video, you engage and build trust with an audience which inspires them to visit your site, i.e. increased traffic. Building that trust also results in longer site visits for which Google rewards you with higher rankings. Longer stays means more exposure to product and thus higher conversions.

Simple Video Marketing

I’ve found video marketing to be very simple. All I use is a Flip video camcorder, a tiny tripod and Camtasia Studio to edit and produce my videos before uploading them to YouTube and other video upload sites.

Don’t make this mistake!

BTW, the biggest mistake that I see people making when they upload their videos to YouTube is that they don’t link back to their blogs from the description.

You gotta do that IF you want the traffic and increases conversions!

UPDATE: The BubblePly service is no longer available. Please watch How to Add an Affiliate Link to a YouTube Video instead.

Do you make your own videos to promote products online as an affiliate? Does your merchant allow you to use their videos that are posted to YouTube, Blip.TV, Google Video, Metacafe and other video portals WITHOUT providing you with a way to embed your affiliate links?

Well, an easy and free way to embed your affiliate links in videos is by using the online service BubblePly.

You can add a link to the bottom of a video, or embed hyperlinks in text. When your site visitor clicks on the link, a new browswer window opens and the video continues playing.

Here’s how to embed your affiliate links into a YouTube video:

1. Copy the URL of a video you want to add a link to into the text form at BubblePly.com and click ‘Next’.
2. Pause the video and get your affiliate link.
3. Start the video again, hit ‘Bubble’ and choose your desired bubble format.
4. Enter your text.
5. Enter your affiliate link.
6. Drag the duration buttom right across to the end of the video.
7. Click ‘Done’ and you’re done.

Watch the Instructional Video

In this video I take you through each step of adding your affiliate link into a video using BubblePly.com.

Here is the caveat (there’s ALWAYS at least one, isn’t there?).

It is best to create your own promotional videos as not all merchants will permit you to use their videos for this purpose.

Of course, if you’re one of my affiliates, I have videos for you to use to promote the Super Affiliate Handbook! Just go to the affiliate program news site to learn more.

Video marketing expert, Mike Koenigs, has put together a great series of 4 free videos.

Taken together, these 4 videos amount to a killer free Internet video marketing course.

Mike shows you the right web video camera to buy, which computer equipment and software to use & how to create an online web video campaign that dominates search engines and generates massive traffic.

Here are the titles of the 4 videos:

1. “The Video Camera Buyer’s Guide: What to Buy and Where to Get It”
2. “Mac or PC? Desktop or Laptop? Web Video Producers Want to Know”
3. “How to Get Your Point Across to Any Personality Type by Answering 4 Simple Questions”
4. “The 10×10×4 Market Domination Formula”

Here’s what a few marketers had to say about these videos:

“Excellent video and info my friend! In fact, for the majority of us who
want to succeed in all areas of life, this info is PRICELESS! Your willingness to share this info is greatly appreciated. I’ll use the techniques ASAP.” ~ Robert Anthony

“Your approach is without doubt the most refreshing, devoid of hype “Listen & Learn” method I have had the pleasure to review. You gave up more in 15 minutes for FREE than the majority of self styled “gurus” do after purchasing one of their over-hyped and overpriced products. Thanks for sharing!” ~ Douglas Stuart

“I can’t believe you gave this info away for free….That information is Marketing PHD material. I have been studying internet marketing since last March and all I have to say is YOU GOT IT! You understand the whole process of HOW TO MAKE MONEY!” ~ K.D. Churchill

Now check them out for yourself.

Here’s an easy way to make the search engines love your site.

Adding video to your site or blog increases the amount of time that visitors spend on your site. The more time they spend, the ‘stickier’ your site appears, and ‘sticky’ sites enjoy higher search engine rankings.

The easiest way to put video on your site is to embed code from a video that you found on YouTube, Google Video or other video-sharing site. The video is served by YouTube, so you save bandwidth on your server.

Regardless of your niche, you should be able to find relevant content on any of the major video-sharing sites that will be of interest to your visitors that you can post to your affiliate sites.

For example, to entertain my visitors at Sage-Hearts.com, I posted a very cute animated proposal video that I found on YouTube to my online dating blog.

Find out how easy this is to do by watching my own short video “How to Post a YouTube Video to Your Blog“, which is served by Google Video.

You’ll see that embedding the video is as simple as finding the video that you want to post, then copying and pasting code from the video’s page directly into your post or webpage. You will have to register with YouTube first.

For videos that you find on Google Video, you have to dig a little deeper for the code.

Click the blue ‘Email – Blog – Send to MySpace’ button, then the ‘Embed HTML’ link that comes up directly below it and lastly the code to copy appears in a box below that.

Easy as pie!

Learn how to MAKE your own website videos!

Video experts Jim Edwards and Mike Stewart will teach you how to make Your Own FULL-MOTION Website “Infomericals”, Video Blogs and Video Newsletters and LOTs more in their outstanding and comprehensive Website Video Secrets course.